· Poll victory gives Erdogan power to resist military · Kurdish party wins 23 seats in new parliament
Ian Traynor in Istanbul Tuesday July 24, 2007 The Guardian
Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is likely to use his sweeping election victory to open a dialogue with his country's Kurdish insurgents, according to Turkish and Kurdish experts.
He is also expected to oppose an invasion of Kurdish northern Iraq and has invited the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to Ankara for talks that would include US officials.
Mr Erdogan is in a strong position to dismiss military pressure for a cross-border crackdown on PKK Kurdish guerrillas based in northern Iraq and to extract concessions on the Kurdish conflict from the Americans and Kurdish leaders.
Turkey has massed tens of thousands of troops on the Iraqi border in recent weeks, with hawks in the high command pressing for an invasion. Mr Erdogan has resisted. Thrust into an unassailable position by a landslide election victory on Sunday, he now looks better placed to push a new political initiative on the Kurdish issue rather than opt for military action.
"Invasion is off the agenda now, there's a new momentum," said Cengiz Candar, a Turkish analyst.
As well as securing a national victory on Sunday, Mr Erdogan scored a remarkable triumph in the Kurdish south-east, doubling the vote of his AKP or Justice and Development party in mainly Kurdish areas to win an absolute majority of the vote with 52%.
"The AKP beat us. The government now has complete power and legitimacy," said a Kurdish official in the regional capital of Diyarbakir.
Having received such a vote of confidence from the Kurds, Mr Erdogan is unlikely to alienate them by invading. The Americans are fiercely opposed to a Turkish incursion into Kurdistan, the only bit of Iraq that is relatively stable and successful.
At the weekend, the British ambassador in Ankara said he could not see what Turkey had to gain from invading northern Iraq. Government officials and diplomats agree.
One former Turkish ambassador said Turkish forces would get bogged down "in a quagmire" in the guerrilla territory of mountainous northern Iraq.
An aide to Mr Erdogan said: "There's been 26 cross-border operations in 30 years. If Turkey had the feeling that a 27th would put an end to the PKK, it would not blink."
In addition to the AKP's electoral success in the Kurdish areas, the main Kurdish party in Turkey, the DTP, took 23 seats, putting it in the new parliament for the first time since 1994. The DTP is seen as the political wing of the PKK. The Turkish election system is stacked against it by setting a 10% national threshold for representation in parliament. The DTP beat the system by running candidates as independents.
"That will make a difference," said Hizsar Ozsoy, a Kurdish analyst in Diyarbakir. "There's definitely a chance for a political opening."
The Erdogan camp has been trying to open political channels to the Kurdish leadership in Iraq for months, but has been stymied by the military top brass and the outgoing hostile president of Turkey.
When Mr Erdogan wanted to invite the Iraqi president and Kurdish leader, Jalal Talabani, to Ankara, Turkey's president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, vetoed the move.
In Istanbul and Ankara, the military pressure for an invasion was also seen as a warning to the Erdogan government against dialogue with the Kurdish leadership.
Turkey has been at war with the PKK for 30 years in a conflict that has taken almost 40,000 lives. At least 70 Turkish security forces have been killed this year. Turkey is home to around 15 million Kurds, by far the biggest of the Kurdish populations also native to Iraq, Iran and Syria.
Officially, Turkey does not recognise the regional government of Kurdistan led by Massoud Barzani. But, sources say, there were attempts several months ago to set up a secret meeting between the Turkish foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, and Mr Barzani, who, when leading the Kurdish insurgency against Saddam Hussein, travelled on a Turkish diplomatic passport.
"If there's an improvement in contacts with Kurdistan and with Barzani, that will be good for the Turkish Kurds," said the Kurdish official.
The key to any breakthrough, said the Erdogan aide, was a clear signal on "terrorism" from Mr Barzani.
<http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=117598> European Socialists deplore Baykal's decision to stay
European Socialists have deplored the fact that Deniz Baykal, the leader of the Republican People's Party (CHP), their sister party in Turkey, has chosen not to resign after a resounding electoral defeat on Sunday.
Despite Baykal's defiant stance, his political rivals in the left, Hikmet Çetin and his friends already took action hoping to find a new leader that would take Turkey's left to new heights. Socialists who have strongly criticized Baykal on many occasions -- for being too nationalist, too military-inclined and too removed from the real problems of the Turkish people -- called for the resignation of Baykal just hours after election results that gave the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) a landslide victory unprecedented in Turkish republican history. The officials of Socialist International (SI) told Today's Zaman that any decision on the CHP should wait until the beginning of next year, reacting cautiously to questions of whether the organization would investigate into whether the CHP has been abiding by the rules of the SI.
Despite the SI's prudent approach, one of the heavyweights of the European Socialists, Hannes Swoboda, told Today's Zaman he deplored Baykal's decision to stay at the helm of the party. The vice chairman of the Socialists at the European Parliament said CHP urgently needed fundamental reform. "I doubt this can be done with Mr. Baykal. I deplore the fact that he will not resign and give an opportunity to a new generation of leaders," he said. Cem Özdemir, a German deputy of Turkish origin in the European Parliament, told Today's Zaman that the CHP is now "a private club of Deniz Baykal's" and that it was a waste of energy to comment on it.
The vice chairman of the Socialists -- the second largest group in the European Parliament with 217 out of 785 seats -- and a former rapporteur on Turkey, Swoboda said there would be serious pressure from Europe, including his group, to put the CHP under serious observation to determine whether it is still a Social Democrat party aligning itself with the principles of social democracy. The Socialist leader said that if Baykal manages to survive until September, the SI would "absolutely have a serious debate" about future relations with the CHP. He said there would be a delegation going to Turkey to check facts on the ground that would speak to both current and former members of the CHP, including those who have been elected on the AK Party ticket. When asked if it was ironic that the SI would talk to social democrats elected from AK Party lists, Swoboda said, "It is a disaster for the CHP." Accusing the "so-called leftist parties" and the right-wingers of not being interested in modernizing Turkey, Swoboda said the election has been between the democrats and the non-democrats, implicitly implying that the AK Party was the only democratic party seriously engaged in the modernization of the country.
Özdemir said the new left should be organized in a new political movement that includes liberals, Alevis, union activists, Freedom and Democracy Party (ÖDP) members, members of the Social Democratic People's Party (SHP) and independent Kurds as well as people like Hikmet Çetin and Ercan Karakaş if Baykal resists calls for his resignation. Stressing that the CHP has no relation whatsoever with the universal principles of the left, Özdemir said the SI should start to seriously think about what to do with the CHP.
Jan Marinus Wiersma, the vice chairman of the Socialist group in the European Parliament, and Joost Lagendijk, the co-chairman of the Turkey-EU Joint Parliament Commission, had both called for the resignation of Baykal late Sunday night as it became clear that the CHP had been defeated once again.
25.07.2007 SELÇUK GÜLTAŞLI BRUSSELS
<http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=79136> Women stronger in the Turkish Parliament Tuesday, July 24, 2007
YASEMİN SİM ESMEN ISTANBUL - Turkish Daily News
The number of female deputies more than doubled in Sunday's general elections. Increasing from 24 in the previous Parliament elected in 2002 to 50 in Sunday's elections, women have made their mark on the 2007 general elections. The Justice and Development Party's (AKP) responsibility toward women has increased, claims the Women Entrepreneurs association of Turkey (KAGİDER) President Gülseren Onanç. As evidence, she cites the fact that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) yielded more than half of the female deputies in the new Parliament. She said she believes this to be a directive for the AKP's to solve women's issues in Turkey. "I do not know if the AKP has read this as 'I have now given you the authority and I would like a resolution for my problem.' But a resolution will be demanded," she says.
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118523976477375697.html> Turkey's No. 1 Task Is More Employment By AYSE FERLIEL July 24, 2007; Page A6
ANKARA, Turkey -- Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party's stronger-than-expected victory in parliamentary elections Sunday was an endorsement of economic policies that have helped fuel several years of growth and made the country a candidate for European Union membership, economists and other analysts said.
But rapid growth has failed to translate into more employment, and Mr. Erdogan's next economic task will be to expand jobs and let wealth trickle down to the thousands who either lost their jobs or have never joined the work force.
Economic growth was a major factor in the vote, as Mr. Erdogan acknowledged in a speech after the election Sunday: "We will continue with economic development and democratic reforms with determination in order to raise our nation's living standards."
Markets welcomed the victory by the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, amid expectations the election results would bring continuity in economic restructuring and Turkey's efforts to join Europe. Istanbul's blue-chip stock-market index rose 5.1%, while the Turkish lira rose more than 2% against the dollar and the euro.
Mr. Erdogan has been a strong advocate of the International Monetary Fund-recommended changes Turkey has been implementing since the 1980s to replace state paternalism with private-sector-led growth.
The economy has been booming. In the past five years, growth in gross domestic product exceeded 7% annually, and exports more than tripled to more than $95 billion for the year ended June 30. Stronger growth hasn't substantially reduced Turkey's unemployment rate. The social costs of the changes -- such as increased crime rates, displaced families and even suicides -- are starting to appear before the full benefits of the growth have been realized.
"Economic growth and employment creation have become disconnected," the Independent Social Scientists Alliance of Turkey, a group of academics and researchers, said in a report last month describing Turkey's "jobless growth" path.
Unemployment has remained stubbornly high -- about 10%, compared with 6.5% in 2000, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute. And in the cities, where hundreds of thousands of rural workers flock each year in search of jobs, unemployment last year was 12.6%, the statistical institute says.
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In the past three years, the effects of prolonged unemployment combined with job losses from privatization have started to stanch consumers' willingness to spend, economists have said.
Historically, private consumption in Turkey has accounted for slightly more than half of gross domestic product. In 2001, private-consumption expenditure was growing at a 44% rate but by last year, that had fallen to 16%. In the same period, consumer sentiment also fell sharply.
After Sunday's election victory, "a more unified and progressive AK Party has a fresh mandate...and thus could prove a more effective legislative force," Moody's Investors Service Vice President Kristin Lindow said.
Much will depend on how quickly a new government is formed and on how the AKP-dominated Parliament faces electing a new president. If Mr. Erdogan can come up with a candidate acceptable to all parties as well as the military, and form a government at the same time, a new cabinet will likely announce its program by mid-August, observers say. The new government will have to tackle several structural issues, from unemployment to social-security and tax overhauls.
The Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association said in a report last month that at least 550,000 jobs should be created on average each year, to reduce unemployment outside the agricultural sector.
The AKP government said the key to reducing unemployment is more labor flexibility. "Turkey has made huge progress in terms of macroeconomic reforms. Now, it's time for microreforms, which will make the country more competitive," Finance Minister Kemal Unakitan said in an interview before the election. Mr. Unakitan was re-elected to Turkey's parliament Sunday.
"One of our priorities will be reducing the tax burden on employment," he added. "In addition, we will make labor more flexible, by changing some of the laws that hinder employment. Part-time employment should also be encouraged."
The industrialists' association report echoed Mr. Unakitan's views. "The labor market has to be supported by micro reforms," it said in its report. "Regulations related to flexible labor should be designed such that they can create jobs and not encourage the informal economy," it said. "They should also be supported by social-security reform." -- Yoshie
